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A short walk west of the Centre lies College Green, dominated by the crescent-shaped Council House and by Bristol Cathedral (daily 8am-6pm). Founded around 1140 as an abbey on the supposed spot of St Augustine's convocation with Celtic Christians in 603, it became a cathedral church with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The two towers on the west front were erected in the nineteenth century in a faithful act of homage to Edmund Knowle, architect and abbot at the start of the fourteenth century. Inside the cathedral, Abbot Knowle's choir offers one of the country's most exquisite examples of the early Decorated style of Gothic, while the adjoining Elder Lady Chapel , dating from the early thirteenth century, contains some fine tombs and some eccentric carvings of animals, including a monkey playing the bagpipes accompanied by a ram on the violin. The ornate Eastern Lady Chapel has some of England's finest examples of heraldic glass. From the south transept, a door leads through to the Chapter House , a richly carved piece of late Norman architecture. Climbing steeply up from College Green, the shop-lined Park Street has some elegant Georgian streets leading off it - for instance Great George Street and Berkeley Square, from either of which you can enter Brandon Hill Park , site of the landmark Cabot Tower , built at the end of the last century to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Cabot's voyage to America. You can climb up the 105-foot tower for the city's best panorama. At the top of Park Street stands central Bristol's other chief landmark, the Wills Memorial Tower , erected in the 1920s to lend some stature to the newly opened university. One of the last great neo-Gothic buildings in England, the tower was the gift of the local Wills tobacco dynasty, the university's main benefactors. Next to the tower, on Queen's Road, the City Museum and Art Gallery (daily 10am-5pm; free) occupies another building donated by the Wills clan. The sections on local archeology, geology and natural history are pretty well what you'd expect, but the scope of the museum is occasionally surprising - it has the largest collection of Chinese glass on show outside China itself, and some magnificent Assyrian reliefs, carved in the eighth century BC. The second-floor gallery of paintings and sculptures includes work by English Pre-Raphaelites and French Impressionists, as well as a few choice older pieces, among them a portrait of Martin Luther by Cranach and Giovanni Bellini's Descent into Limbo .
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